Dinacon - Dinachronicle (Week 1 2022)

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DinaChronicle

DreamSpace and Dinacon Weekly Updates

Saturday, 9 July 2022

CIVET CAT SPOTTED

This week's top story is the discovery of wild civet cats around DreamSpace. They have
been spotted on camera eating bugs, carrying small rodents, and generally slinking
around. The most common time they have been spotted seems to be in the early

morning! Learn more about them by checking out the Wild Lives Class at Dinacon!

What are They
Building in There?

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Strange sounds and structures are
reported from all over DreamSpace.
Weird slimes are growing, and laughter
rings out all day and night. Read more to
find out what strange things they are
making at Dinacon.

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Small Creatures in the

Lagoon Water:

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Tiny animals have been found in the
water! They appear to be quite neat and
enjoy swimming in many different ways.
Learn more about these mysterious little
friends and what Dinacon participants
are exploring in this issue!

2022.Dinacon.org

Dinacon and Infrastructure

DreamSpace Collective and Dinacon

The DreamSpace teams have joined with the
international Dinacon participants to create
lots of new infrastructure for exploring the
natural world!

The goal of Dinacon is to find new ways of
interacting with the non-human, natural
world. To achieve these goals, we work
together to make new, creative spaces for
building, learning, sharing, and investigating.

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Heat Press for Upcycling Acrylic

DreamSpace Collective and Dinacon (Paula Te)

Paula Te, Node Leader at
Dinacon, and DreamSpace
Collective support the Trash
for Trade plastics recycling
project by making a DIY
hydraulic press for recycling
acrylic plastic and more!

We are welding together a
frame that supports an 8-ton
car jack for compressing
plastic. Scrap acrylic
discarded after fabrication
can be heated up in an oven
or heat press and condensed
back into acrylic sheets for
reuse as a building material.

The hydraulic press can also
be used to compress other
plastics or anything requiring
tons of force. Its really
impressive!

Plastic
String

Andy Quitmeyer
and Trash for Trade

There are plastic bottles
everywhere! We 38D printed
an attachment to a motorized
cutter to turn the trash into a
usable new filament quickly!
We can tie things, heat
shrink, and one day even
turn this string into more 8D
printer filament!

Page 3 2022.Dinacon.org

WildLives Workshop

Alex Hornstein, DreamSpace, and Local Participants

It is easy to forget in our
day-to-day lives, and we are
surrounded by a vast and
complex ecosystem; the
[Wild Life project] gives us
perspective into our
relationships and the inner
workings of this ecosystem
by revealing the hidden
world of animals within our
backyards. For the past
week, Alex has been
teaching classes about the

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nature we are surrounded
by within Sri Lanka and the
stories we can learn from
their interactions. His team
of six groups of students hid
camera traps (motion-
activated cameras) to
capture the natural
happenings of their areas;
what they found was
shocking. On the first day,
the students found an
“Insane number of animals”

that they had never seen
despite living near them
their whole lives. Currently,

our ecosystems are
experiencing significant
change. By documenting

and sharing these changes
with our community, we
can get a more holistic

perspective and
understanding of our
environment.

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2022.Dinacon.org

Get to know about DreamSpace

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The Story Lab of environmental challenges. In in their immediate
DreamSpace Academy creates addition, Story Lab makes the communities through
the next generation of incredible stories of grassroots innovation.

authentic visual storytellers DreamSpace Academy and the
using profound storytelling changemakers to tell why they
principles to solve complex do, what they do, and how they
local socio-economic and do to solve the local challenges

Bio Plastics

Bio Lab, Saad Chinoy, and other Dinasaurs

Saad's obsession with
strange chemicals doesn't
stop at coffee. He has been
leading an initiative to
combine his bioplastic and
kombucha leather
investigations to blend with
the existing fungal research
at Bio Lab! They have
mixed and morphed
different goops into new
materials that can be
machined, sewn, and laser

2022.Dinacon.org

Batticaloa from Above

2022.Dinacon.org

Fritz Francisco, DreamSpace, and Local Participants

Plankton Fishing

Fritz is working on the
general animal-
environment interaction.

This means taking a closer
look at our social
surroundings and the
physical environment we
see ourselves in. In his
project, he wants to achieve
a more intimate interaction
between humans and other
natural systems in their

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proximity, be it animals,
plants, or anything we may
find. Today we can use
digital methods to assist us,

and cameras, computers,
and microcontrollers can
help bring back a

fundamental understanding
of our surroundings. His
project is trained in animal
behavior and focuses on the
learning process of animals

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Water Works

and how they respond to

novel situations. By
implementing a simple
reward system for local

animals, such as crows, the
goal is to have them assist us
in gathering recyclable
material, such as bottle caps
and plastic bottles. "

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2022.Dinacon.org

About Dinacon

Dinacon will take place all of July 2022.

Every Saturday will be an "Open Day" where we will share the exciting projects we have
been working on.

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THE DIGITAL NATURALISM
CONFERENCE (|
1 - 31 JULY 2022

Dinacon has received financial support from the
Gathering Oo for Open Science Hardware
(openhardware.science). It has also benefited from
the many contributions of the participants and other |
groups like Hackaday and the NYFA Grants Council.
ns, Gathering for Open

Everything created at dinacon is free and open to edont isid vü

share and, at most, restricted to a Creative
Commons, Attribution 4.0 International License.

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